My holiday to Israel – October 2019
In October, I went to Israel for a week with a group of 45 deaf people from across the UK , along with two qualified British Sign Language (BSL) interpreters.
Deaf people and technology
You may not be aware of the range of equipment available to support deaf people in their daily lives. This is another area which has improved greatly since my childhood.
When I was a child in the 1970s, we had an old black‑and‑white television in the living room. Obviously, technology was not at a point whereby there were captions or in-vision interpreters, so I watched the pictures move across the screen and tried to make sense of what was happening. I also relied on my mum to fill in the parts I couldn’t catch, but she didn’t use British Sign Language (BSL), so it meant that I had to lip-read (remember, lipreading is 90% guess work) and only got brief snippets of information. I was about five or six when we finally got a colour television, a set we rented from the Co‑op, and it felt unbelievably exciting.
Deaf people can often feel very isolated in a group of hearing people. I love my family, but I hated family occasions growing up, because I was always left out of the conversation and left wondering what was going. With a little basic deaf awareness you can involve deaf people, and stop them having to experience this.
My first BSL exam
When I was working for social services, I used to love reading the British Deaf news magazine. I started having it delivered every month when I was at Doncaster College, and I loved to read about all the news from the deaf community. You could even make pen friends with other deaf people through the magazine. One time I saw an advert from CACDP (the council for the advancement of communication with deaf people, which has now become Signature) advertising their British Sign Language courses.
Moving onto the workplace
I left Doncaster College in June 1986. It was a really emotional time for me, as I had made friends from all over the country. Now we were heading back to our respective homes, and having to say goodbye to each other. It also meant saying goodbye to my first boyfriend.
I left school in July 1983 and enjoyed having a relaxing time at home over the summer. However, I started to get upset again at the thought of going to a new college in September that year.
I’d like to give you a little bit of background about myself. I was born and bred in Burton-upon-Trent, where I still live to this day. My parents were both hearing and I was their only child. They had no reason to expect that I may be deaf. Of course, now we have new born hearing tests so deaf babies are diagnosed straight away, but at that time things were very different, so I was not diagnosed until I was one year old.